Hope Rises: Make Your Life, Love, and Leadership SoarSample

Joy is the emotional result of hope.

Peace is the emotional result of faith.

Love is the expression of both.

In Scripture, faith, hope, and love are inextricably linked. They form a dynamic spiritual triad. But what is most fascinating is that none of these may be commanded or ordered on demand. Rather, they are each realized in a most indirect way, when our focus is on others.

Self-love is shallow. But love that is directed toward others has transformative power that sets another free to fulfill their God-given potential. Love is the only way to grasp another human being at the core of who they are. No one can fully know another unless he loves him. This love enables someone to see essential traits in another that remain unseen by others who only know that person casually. 

At the same time, love allows someone to see potential in someone else that has yet to be actualized. By this love, the loving person enables the loved one to actualize those potentialities. By believing in him and making him aware of what he can be and could become, he allows these possibilities to blossom into reality in the soil of unconditional love.

Likewise, faith opens you up to possibilities beyond yourself. Self-dependence eventually exhausts its limited resources. At some point you come to the end of yourself. Only then can you clearly see God’s hand at work in an unvarnished way. When you discover that God is all you have, you also come to realize that he is all that you will ever need. Faith sees God’s fingerprints on each and every life circumstance. Faith sees God at work, even in the messiest of life’s difficulties.

And as for hope, it springs from a spirit infused with love and faith. While we can understand some of the mechanics involved in generating it, and we can apply principles that can accelerate it, hope dwells in the domain of the divine. Hope springs eternal from the soul that is not limited by the conflict, nor the circumstances of that which is mortal.

Faith and hope form the foundation and love is the capstone of a meaningful life. For love is the fullest expression of both faith and hope. Hope believes that tomorrow can be brighter than today. And such a belief is grounded in the reality that the God of love has a purpose and a plan for each one of us that ultimately supersedes our circumstances. That is the essence of hope.